Losing time
November 1, 2006
I have been known to lose track of time every once in a while, but not 3 days. I just logged onto our monitoring server after noticing some oddness in time. When logging on, the server said it was the 29th of October. That was 3 days ago. So I execute ntpdate pool.ntp.org and everything was back in sync, but this was odd. I vaguely remembered having to do that shortly after rebuilding the box. So I ran the command again, and sure enough, in a span of about 10 minutes, the server had lost about 92 seconds. Time for some research!
After googling about a bit, I stumbled across this little gem. Apparently due to the nature of how linux keeps the clock in sync, and the fact that the host server is a little busy, this was causing a massive time loss. The article contains details on how to fix it.
After running with the suggested changes for a few hours, I’ve not seen much of a time loss (0.001 of a second) over the few hours. Much better.
Technorati Tags: VMWare, Linux, Tech, Work
Posted in Linux, Technology, Work
I'm a full time network administrator, working for a large company in the automotive industry. I enjoy spending time with my family, when I get away from work that is. I also enjoy photography, and computer programming.
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November 30th, 1999 at 0:00
November 7th, 2006 at 11:38
[...] Then I remembered, this is the machine that was having issues with clock sync because it’s running as VMWare guest, and I had setup ntpdate to run every few minutes. It seems the time on the server sporadically runs faster than that of the windows server it is pinging, and as such, the times in the pings seem to come back faster than when they were sent. As it appears to only occur once every 15-20 pings or so, I’m not that worried. It’s not triggering alarms, it just flags one of the ping result sets as “warning” and goes away on the next ping. [...]
August 2nd, 2007 at 14:46